iPhone 17e: I’m Vaguely Disappointed

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(I’ll be posting some Reactions as we go. Reactions aren’t Reviews, or In-Depth Analysis. But on the upside, I’m not going to bother you with thoughts that are already showing up everywhere else.)

I’m looking at the specs and the design of the new iPhone 17e and I’m not seeing anything worth complaining about. Honest. It looks like a fine phone.

I’m just a little bit disappointed. I felt the same way about the 16e. Apple’s entry-level iPhone doesn’t strike me as a device with an interesting premise. I feel as if Apple just unrolled the blueprints for the iPhone 17 and thought about how to make a less-expensive version of that thing. They started with this, and then worked their way down to there.

It doesn’t strike me as a device that was designed from the ground up to hit a maximum price point. In my eye, that’s the more interesting challenge, and it creates more interesting products at this price level. It’s the difference between designing a less-interesting version of an expensive thing, and designing a brand-new thing that’s truly exciting…where the lower price is among the least-interesting things about it.

The price is the other thing that’s nagging at me right now. Was $599 the best they could do? Is $599 even a worthy goal?

These observations are annoyingly vague. And yet they’re my honest initial reactions…so we’re stuck with them!

Designing downward

When I speak of “working their way downward,” I don’t even mean that Apple did a cut-rate speedrun-redesign of the iPhone 17. The 17e is an exceptional phone. Which is another way of saying “It’s an iPhone.”

So why not just ship this as the iPhone 17, and announce a price drop?

The iPhone 17 currently starts at $799. What would happen if Apple decided to do away with the e-series entirely, and set $599, or even $699, as the new ground-floor price for The Latest iPhone?

Well, nothing good from a business standpoint, that’s for sure. Apple’s perceived as a luxury brand. This not the biggest reason for the iPhone’s success, but Apple can’t afford to mess with the iPhone’s status as something aspirational.

The other reason against this is that Apple knows exactly who’s buying iPhones, and why; the iPhone lineup is laser-targeted towards those people. Among Those People are the new members of India’s massively-expanding middle class. They don’t want a cheap phone! Many of them have been stuck with lame, underpowered, practically water-soluble Android phones for years! They want iPhones!

No, my question is just an academic one. Like the Trolley Problem or further sequels to Toy Story, it’s not something that anybody should consider actually doing. The proposal is meant to provoke thought, conversation, and beard-stroking.

(And those of you who lack facial hair of your own shouldn’t feel left out. You can get one on Amazon. Here’s a four-pack for under ten bucks…go on and invite three friends over, order a couple of pizzas, and make a whole night of it!)

Conceptually, I’m way more enthusiastic about the “from the bottom, up” design process. What if Apple gave a team of pirates the freedom to design something fresh — something free of the expectations and burdens that everybody puts on a “real” iPhone? “Do anything you want, so long as it’s a working phone and it retails for no more than $599.”

Apple went through this once before, if you’ll recall. It’s how the $9995 Lisa begat the $2495 Macintosh M0001.

The Macintosh team didn’t set out to make a cheaper Lisa. They studied it carefully. They mapped out a crystal-clear vision of what made the Lisa brilliant, and what held it back. They worked out which bits of the Lisa hardware, firmware, and OS were absolutely mission-critical, and which bits did nothing to put that vision into crisper focus.

If a band of Apple pirates were to try to do the same to the iPhone…what would they design? I can’t even imagine it. I do know it’d be nothing like the 17e…hence my disappointment.

And is $599 ambitious enough?

The iPhone 17e is a lot cheaper than the iPhone 17! Two hundred smackers less expensive! Yow!

Still, I really, really wanted it to be $499. I want to say it’s only because the extra $100 would put even more distance between the pricing of the 17e and the 17. But in truth…geez, $500 is just right.A 50th anniversary is more impressive than a 40th anniversary, and if you’re risking jail time for obliterating the speed limit, why settle for 96 miles an hour when 100 is right there?

What would it have taken to get the price of the 17e down to $499?

Could the 17e have done without the Action button? MagSafe? Did it need an A19 processor? Could Apple have launched it with a 128 gigabyte storage option?

The iPhone 17e is way too expensive to be considered a “budget” phone. It wouldn’t have been a budget phone even at $499. It’s merely “midrange.” Samsung and Motorola and OnePlus all make some excellent — really, surprisingly feature-packed — phones for under $300, and even under $200. There’s a lot of garbage at this price point, but the good ones are an object lesson in “designing-up.” The Moto G Power ($270) isn’t nearly as nice as the 17e, or Google’s $500 Pixel 10a, that’s for certain. But it’s way more than half as capable as either of them. To me, a phone like the Moto G is as impressive an achievement in engineering as anything the iPhone team’s ever done.

Despite my faint praise, I’m glad the 17e is here

$200 is still $200. There are plenty of people around the world who can’t justify spending $799 on a phone. Maybe they can just make $599.

The angel on my shoulder is suggesting that I throw something in here about how crass consumerism and brand-worship are destroying our collective soul. But we’re all going to be stuck with that problem no matter what. So what’s so bad about millions more people being able to afford something that’s as well-made as a phone can be?

I’d love to see Apple try to make a truly budget version of…practically anything. But here and now (and once again, a little later this week, if rumors hold true) I’m certainly going to praise Apple for making anything more affordable.

"More affordable” means “more accessible.” Great engineering can’t prove its worth to those among us who can only admire it from the colder, wetter side of a store window.